Andy Spade 00Simon Doonan 00Greta Gerwig 00Ross Intelisano 00Niki Russ Federman 00Brian Balderston 00Margaret Stetz 00Rosanne Cash 00David Carr 00Matt Wolf and Ariel Schrag 00Kelly Jones 00Brandi Chastain 00Jeff Zimbalist 00Jill Meisner 00Kenneth Goldsmith 00Pat Mahoney 00Laura Jane Kenny 00Meghan O’Rourke 00Kayla Klepac 00Jonathan Levine 00Yael Meridan Schori 00Albert Maysles 00Paola Antonelli 00Catherine Pierce 00April Bloomfield 00Brian Dwyer 00Debbie Millman 00Harvey 00Stephen Elliott 00Emily Spivack 00Piper Kerman 00Sabrina Gshwandtner 00Dorothy Finger 00

James Johnson 00Dustin Yellin 00Cynthia Rowley 00Marina Abramovic 00Edith Raymond Locke 00Kathleen Drohan 00Tiler Peck 00Jenna Wortham 00Andrew Tarlow 00Jeremy Bailey 00Brian Droitcour 00Lindsey Thornburg 00Andrew Kuo 00Davy Rothbart 00Maira Kalman 00Tito 00Dapper Dan 00Sasha Frere-Jones 00Pamela Jones 00Tamara Santibanez 00Courtney Maum 00John Hodgman 00Heidi Julavits 00Elisabeth Subrin 00Rachel Comey 00Marcus Samuelsson 00Miss Lisa 00Sanya Kantarovsky 00Susan Bennett 00Susan Orlean 00Karuna Scheinfeld 00Sherry Turkle 00Becky Stark 00

11

My job is to give this jacket a second life. The woman who sold it to me at a flea market on 25th Street told me it had been sitting in her attic for fifteen years, since her husband died. When I got it, it was barely wearable because it was so stiff, and it was covered in dust. Anytime I would wear it, I’d come home and my wife Kate would say, “Your shirt and pants have green dust on them.” It bleeds whenever I wear it. I’m not being a weirdo, but I feel like I have a part of this person on me, like I’m actually borrowing his character.

I did an ad campaign for a clothing company that makes chinos. The tagline for the campaign was “You can’t get them old until you get them new.” I hate when designers make things look fake old—with splatter paint or acid washed, for exam-ple. With this coat, it’s already old, and I want to take care of it, for the guy who had it before me.

When I started my clothing and accessory company I said to my wife, “The only thing that’s missing is a hundred years of history. I guess I have to start now.” In a hundred years someone will carry one of my bags and it will mean something. Today it doesn’t, but as it’s lived in, it will.

Not only does this jacket’s history leave its residue on me—and I don’t mind the dirt—but because it was in the attic for so many years, it’s also musty. That mustiness is better than any perfume. I don’t wear perfume. I prefer wearing jackets that smell like they’ve had lives. That’s my cologne—a dirty, musty jacket.

—A s to ld to Em i ly S p i vac k

Andrew Spade is the cofounder of Partners & Spade

and Sleepy Jones.

Andy Spade

13

One by one my roommates, friends, and boyfriends in Los Angeles started getting sick from AIDS. It was very early on in the epidemic and when you went to the doctor, they couldn’t refer you to an expert. They asked you if you were religious, mean-ing, you were going to die.

I decided to join a gym with a friend who had been diagnosed with AIDS. At least we could be healthy, we thought. We became members of Sports Connection, also known as Sports Erection, in West Hollywood. This was in the early 1980s during the aerobics heyday in Los Angeles, when Jane Fonda had her own aerobics studio and women walked around in pastel blue Lycra tights with pink leg warmers, white Reeboks, and sweatbands.

Going to aerobics became an obsession. I have a low center of gravity and very strong legs so I was instantly very good at following all the routines. I’d power through an hour of exercise and sweat a lot—so as not to get squat. My mother used to say to my sister and me, “Now you’re both short; you don’t want to become squat.” She always wore longline girdles and smoked cigarettes so she wouldn’t get fat. I had aerobics.

I was working at Maxfield back then, which was the first groovy designer shop in L.A. Customers like Fleetwood Mac, Natalie Wood, Cher, Linda Ronstadt, and Joni Mitchell would shop there because it was the first place in L.A. where you could buy Alaïa, Comme des Garçon, or Versace. They also carried Stephen Sprouse. He did these Lycra cycle pant things for men that were orange and black with mirror graffiti writing on them, and I thought they would be great for aerobics. When I look at them now, I hear the disco version of Cats, lots of Pointer Sisters, and all the aerobics anthems that were so popular back then.

I went every day. In an attempt to do “healthy” things, I became addicted to the lights, the music, the endorphins. It was a very showbiz-y way to keep in shape, and many actresses would go to the class, like Madonna when she was starting to become well known. They filmed the aerobics movie Perfect, with John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis, at Sports Connection about six months after we joined. Curtis had the ultimate aerobics body—legs, legs, legs, and very toned arms. The regulars in the class even had the opportunity to sign up as extras. The exhibitionism appealed to me. I always threw on my Lycra, strode into class, stood right in front of the mirror, and got into it. And I was the only one wear-ing these super New Wave, groovy Lycra leggings.

At the time, I was very into the New Romantic look. I had a lot of that Vivienne Westwood pirate clothing, and I’m in the “Bette Davis Eyes” video, by Kim Carnes. That look was big in L.A. and London. What’s noteworthy is that back then I could go out with my New Romantic friends in the evening and chuck on my leggings for aerobics the next day. There wasn’t this slavish desire to be cool. It wasn’t about sucking in your cheeks or money or table service or prestige. It was more about having fun, being fun, being stupid, being mad, being theatrical, being as naff as you wanted.

English people are acutely aware of what’s naff and what’s not, but we willfully embrace naff things. I knew that doing aerobics was one of the naffest things I could do, but I loved it because I was in charge of my own naffness.

The cult of aerobics was waning by the time I moved to New York in 1985, but with so many people getting sick, for a couple of years it was an antidote to this incredible malaise of melancholy that had been blanketing L.A.

—A s to ld to Em i ly S p i vac k

Simon Doonan

Simon Doonan is the creative ambassador-at-large of the New York City–based clothing store Barneys.

He is also the author of Beautiful People and The Asylum.

15

Twelve years ago I was working as a stage manager at a theater company in Vermont for the summer. I was the worst stage manager of all time. I had just figured out that I could fall in love with people, and that I could be in love. I was already in love with one person and I started falling in love with lots of people. I felt very guilty about it, but it also felt like an appropriate response to figuring out you can be in love. I was in love with love. In high school I would have these horrible crushes on people but they were never reciprocated or the people were gay. Then, in college, I had the experience of looking into someone’s eyes and saying, “I love you” and he said, “I love you” back.

I had this crush, or love, for this actor at the theater in Vermont. His name was David, and I thought he was so beautiful. He had this very soft button down shirt. When I hugged him, and I would always invent reasons to do so, I would touch his shirt. It was very chaste, and nothing ever happened. I was in love with him, but he was twen-ty-six-years old and I was eighteen, and when you’re eighteen, twenty-six seems really old.

David left that summer before I did. We took him to the bus station, and I cried because I was eighteen and dramatic. I watched him go and I felt bereft. My friends and I returned to the falling apart cabin in the woods that had been our home that summer. I went to the room where I had a bunk bed. Hanging on my bunk was that button down shirt, his shirt! Tucked inside the shirt pocket was a note. He told me I was beautiful and a creature of light.

Doesn’t it just kill you? Can you imagine an eighteen-year old girl coming back from the bus sta-tion to her room and seeing that the guy she loved had left his shirt for her? He knew. He just knew it, and it was beautiful.

I always write in the shirt because it makes me feel like I have a secret. When you write, it’s good to have a secret because in a way you do. You have to nurture the secret until other people know about it. Maybe wearing this shirt connects me with a part of my younger self that was incredibly emotional and vivid, and those feelings, combined with that sense of having a secret, is how I like to feel when I write.

—A s to ld to Em i ly S p i vac k

Greta Gerwig

Greta Gerwig is an actress and filmmaker known for her roles

in Frances Ha, Greenberg, and Damsels in Distress.

17

My grandmother, Anna Leonardi Intelisano, emi-grated from Sicily to Queens, New York, in 1946 because war-torn Italy provided little opportunity for work. She left behind a baby (my father), a husband, and a huge extended family. Anna cleaned houses and then became a seamstress. She saved enough cash to bring my grandfather and father to the U.S., and her sister and brother, too. For many years, Anna left her house before dawn to open the seamstress shop where she worked. She eventually rose to the rank of sample dressmaker for Diane von Furstenberg and Maggie London. She spoke an eclectic mix of Sicilian dialect, Italian, and broken English. She was a master cook of lasagna, cutlets, and marinara sauce. Anna took care of everyone.

In her “spare” time, Anna created vibrant dresses, scarves, and ties. My father always wore her ties. If anyone ever complimented one of them, my father would simply take it off and give it away. I’ve seen him do it a hundred times, even to strangers.

My immigrant father hustled his way to mid-dle-class life, and in 1975, when I was six, we moved to a house right on the beach, on 138th Street in Belle Harbor. Rockaway Beach was our backyard. I could jump off the deck onto the beach. I loved the feeling of sand in my sheets. The official first day of summer would always be when I ran the length of my beach and dove into the Atlantic.

As I grew older, Anna tailored all of my clothes. I can still picture her kneeling before me, uttering with needles in her mouth, “Is that good, sweetie?” Anna lived a long, healthy life. She worked until she was seventy-eight and cooked for her great grand-children, who still talk about her meatballs. In early October 2012, at age ninety-five, Anna passed away.

Three weeks later, Hurricane Sandy was rapidly heading toward New York. My parents were still living in the house where I grew up, and, like most die-hard Rockaway folks, didn’t want to evacuate.

My brother, children, and I begged them to stay with my family in Brooklyn for the night. They finally relented and drove over with nothing more than a change of clothes and toiletries.

Sandy struck Rockaway hard. Early the morn-ing after, my parents and I drove toward home. We blew through the Marine Parkway Bridge before it was even reopened. Cars were abandoned. Houses were a mess. Neighbors were roaming the streets like zombies. We maneuvered down 138th Street, slowly, and fifty feet away from the beach, I got out of the car by myself to look. Sandy had ripped away half of our house, as if she had swiped her massive arm from the beach side and scooped out every-thing she wanted. The entire side of the house was exposed for the world to see. It was crushing. My parents walked up to the house and were horrified. We hugged, talked, cried, and eventually drove somberly back to Brooklyn.

My parents stayed with us for a week or so. We all mourned together. My wife Stacey took care of us all. My dad then decided he and my mom would live in Anna’s house in Queens until they figured out what they should do next. Even after her death, Anna was still taking care of her boy.

Our Rockaway house was condemned. No one was allowed in. From the beach, we could see my father’s second floor closet ripped open, but not completely destroyed. In the closet you could see his ties, including Anna’s. Weeks later, despite many warnings, my dad’s friend ventured in and retrieved some valuables, including a bunch of Anna’s ties.

That day, my father came over to my house, smiling for what seemed like the first time since the storm. He proudly presented me with two of Anna’s ties. I wear them all the time. I like handling the silk as I knot the ties. Even so, if you see me in one of Anna’s ties and you fancy it, compliment me on it. I just may take it off and give it to you.

Ross Intelisano

Ross Intelisano is a Queens-boy who lives in Brooklyn and practices law in Manhattan.

19

I spent a lot of time at Russ & Daughters growing up. The earliest job I can remember giving myself was when I was about five years old. I would wait by the store entrance for the produce deliveries to arrive. The delivery guys would wheel in fifty-pound bags of potatoes, onions, and carrots with hand trucks, and I would jump on top of those sacks and direct them to the kitchen. I felt very important.

When I wasn’t doing this “work,” I would run behind the side of the store where bins were filled with all kinds of candies. I would go down the line of bins and just fill my pockets. We sold those coffee nibs that my grandmother always had in her apart-ment, and still does. You’d eat those candies and your upper and lower jaw would get stuck together.

My father, who took over the business from my grandparents, liked to show me off to the custom-ers. I’d answer the phone and everyone thought that was cute. During the Jewish holidays, which are the busiest times, I would help out behind the counter. Just like my dad, if I was working, I’d wear a white coat. Everyone who was working did. For one hun-dred years, everyone always has.

I left the store for a while. I went to college, worked at a museum in San Francisco, worked at a United Nations nonprofit. Subconsciously, I now realize, I was trying to get as far away from the business as I could. In 2001, though, seeing the need to improve the store’s terribly basic website, I offered to work for my father on this one project. My father, however, took my entrance as his exit, his salvation. Very quickly he wanted me to decide whether I would take over Russ & Daughters or not. There was no middle ground. It was a tortured couple of years because the thing I knew I loved was getting tainted, like I was being forced into an arranged marriage. At that point, entering the family business wouldn’t have been because it was

something I wanted to do. It would have been because it was expected of me. At the time, I saw doing the very thing that my great grandparents, my grandparents, and my parents did as a failure.

Being a fishmonger was not a path I had expected to fall into, so in a dark moment, and to buy myself some time and space, I enrolled in Yale’s business school. By the second day I knew it wasn’t the right fit.

At that point, I’d had an opportunity to think about the meaning of Russ & Daughters. Following in the footsteps of three prior generations of my family was actually not a suffocating thing; it was, instead, this special, powerful legacy, and also a great challenge—how to maintain the very authen-ticity and tradition of a business with such social currency and history, and then to make it grow. Because I had consciously stepped away, it was then my choice to come back. I joined my cousin and we became the fourth generation of the Russ family to own and operate the business.

I recently brought my two-year-old daughter into the store. In my mind, I had envisioned her getting used to the store and the smells, just as I had, saying hello to all of the customers, and everyone getting soft and fuzzy. I could just imagine her running up and down the store, eating a bagel and a pickle. Instead, she came in, saw me, and everyone around her, in white coats, and had a meltdown. The white coats, it turns out, reminded her of a trip to the hospital that had taken place a few months prior. She started ripping the coat off of me saying, “No, no, no, no!” My whole dream of the story didn’t go as expected.

Who knows, though, perhaps one day she’ll get over her fear of white coats and be the fifth genera-tion of Russ & Daughters to put one on.

—A s to ld to Em i ly S p i vac k

Niki Russ Federman

Niki Russ Federman is a fourth generation owner of Russ & Daughters in New York.

21

I knew something was wrong the moment I walked inside the house. I’d been working as a project manager for a guy who renovated houses in Washington, D.C., and I was dropping off a small crew to do demolition on the downstairs apartment for the owners who lived in the upstairs apartment. The door was ajar, like it had been forced open, and I heard something upstairs, but I knew no one was supposed to be home.

I told the two people with me to grab sledge-hammers and crowbars from the car in case we needed weapons. I could hear someone scurrying around. I shouted that he needed to come down. I paused. No answer. I yelled that we were coming up. “I’m coming downstairs and I have a gun!” he yelled back. He was just repeating it over and over, “I have a gun! I have a gun!” If he had a gun, I was stepping aside, I thought, as I looked at the crowbar I was holding.

Because of the layout of the space, I couldn’t really see him until he was eight or ten feet away from me. I saw that he didn’t have a gun, but that he had a knife, something he must have found rummaging through kitchen drawers for a weapon. At that point, he lunged at me. I instinctively raised my arms to protect myself, and he knocked me backward.

The guy stood up and tried to hurdle over me. But I had two guys with me, construction dudes. One was a big Honduran guy who was born on a ranch and the other guy was from New Zealand and played rugby. You don’t fuck with these guys. So mid-hurdle, the Honduran grabbed the burglar and body slammed him. The burglar got back up. The rugby player kicked him down. I saw one of the construction guys standing over the attacker with

a pickax. He must have realized that if he swung that thing, he was going to kill the guy because he paused. At that moment, the burglar jumped up and started running away.

By then, I had my bearings, and I took the crowbar and threw it down the street at him. It was like the movies; it got the guy in the legs and he went down. The rugby player grabbed the crowbar and chased him until they reached an alley, at which point the rugby player saw that the burglar had another couple of knives, like he was ready to battle, and decided it was probably best not to pursue him any longer.

While that was happening, I realized I was bleeding. I started feeling warmth on my body, but I couldn’t feel pain anywhere so I didn’t know if I had been stabbed in the arm or the ribs or the stomach. I just felt warmth.

It was February, so it was cold, and we were all standing outside. I was wearing a jacket along with a gray zip-up shirt that is typically for running or biking. I looked down and saw a big blood stain on the arm of my jacket. It was when I saw the blood seeping through my coat sleeve that I knew I had been stabbed in the arm.

The ambulance took me to Howard University Hospital, and I got seven or eight stitches. It could have been much worse: what if I hadn’t raised my arms in self-defense when the guy lunged at me?

I threw away the coat because it was drenched with blood, but I kept the shirt because I was able to wash out the stain. Even though it still has that one inch slit in the arm—the point of entry where the guy got me—it’s still wearable so why get rid of it? It’s Patagonia and that stuff lasts forever.

—A s to ld to Em i ly S p i vac k

Brian Balderston

Brian Balderston is a Brooklyn-based artist and cofounder of Present Company.

23

“Oh, I remember you. You’re the woman with the ears.” I’ve heard this often at social and professional gatherings. Not that there’s anything unusual about the appendages—pale, fleshy, and half-hidden by a mop of curls—on either side of my face. The ears that leave such a lasting impression aren’t attached to my head, however, but to a headband. They’re white and fuzzy on the outside, a satiny pink on the inside, and measure about six-inches long when standing erect, though they can be bent or tilted at a jaunty angle. And they’re not on view all the time, but come out mainly when I’m giving public lec-tures that have something to do with Beatrix Potter, the British children’s book author and artist whose work is one of my academic specialties. Sometimes, depending on the time of day, they get replaced by the pair that I call “Evening Ears,” which are entirely white and ornamented with sequins, so that they appear a bit more formal (or at least sparkly and festive).

Why would a middle-aged professor of women’s studies and literature—with a PhD from Harvard, no less—be wearing these? I have a list of reason-able-sounding excuses. Giving a talk means I’m supposed to be the center of attention, and the ears certainly help to focus the audience on my speech. Especially now, when people sitting in lecture halls have an array of electronic distractions in their laps, there’s nothing like the sight of bunny ears accom-panying a woman’s sober business suit to make them look up from their screens. Obviously, too, if my subject is Beatrix Potter, creator of the immortal Peter Rabbit, a pair of long ears serves as a visual tribute.

But here’s my confession: I like wearing them and, if I had the courage, I’d probably do so more often—maybe all the time. According to the old

feminist adage, “The personal is political.” My attraction to those rabbit ears on a headband is both personal and political, and the two motives weigh equally.

The political angle is easier to explain. Both sets of ears came from a drugstore’s post-Halloween discount aisle and were intended to top off adult party costumes (i.e., low-cut bodysuits, fishnets, high-heels, etc.). The notion of dressing women as “Bunnies” was, of course, the invention of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Clubs. While a young journalist, Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem famously went undercover in 1963 to expose the harassment and miserable working conditions of women who wore the Clubs’ uniforms. Today, there’s something satisfying about taking these symbols of sexual availability and servility and flipping their meaning. By combining bunny ears with a tailored jacket and skirt on the lecture platform at a university, museum, or other cultural institution, I’m doing something subversive. No longer do they signify that women are merely “Playmates.” Conversely, this is also my way of suggesting that women don’t have to be wholly serious to be feminists. Feminists know how to take or make a joke and even enjoy being silly, as I do, with what they wear.

But there’s more to it. I’m drawn to rabbits, especially wild ones. The way they look and move thrills me. They’re funny, yet dignified—cuddly, but wary. They know that they are prey living in a world of predators, so they leap and cavort, but always with their eyes open and their ears up. When I put on that headband to lecture, my ears are up, too. I don’t become a rabbit; I become more myself. And maybe that’s really what makes people remember the ears—and me.

Margaret D. Stetz

Margaret D. Stetz is a writer and professor of women’s studies and humanities at the University of Delaware.

25

I keep clothing from people I love in my closet with the rest of my clothes. Like the scarf with “Mom” knitted into it, made by my daughter Chelsea several years ago. Or my own mom’s sweatshirts and yoga pants and nightgown, which I keep in the drawer with my own nightgowns.

In my closet, hanging with my blouses, there’s a shirt of my dad’s. I don’t do anything special with it. It was such an unusual shirt for him; it’s bright pur-ple with tuxedo pleats down the front, so different from his uniform of black shirts and black jackets, although he did wear it on stage a few times.

My dad died in 2003, and each of his children got some of his clothing. I got his heavy gray coats, some stage jackets, a pair of really nice boots that I’m saving for my son, and a couple of odd things, like one of his J. Peterman khaki jackets that he used to wear in Jamaica.

When we were going through his things, I didn’t have a clear reason for taking this purple tuxedo shirt. My dad was a very big man, so the shirt is absolutely enormous on me, but once in a while I’ll put it on. Sometimes when I look at the jackets and the boots, it makes me very sad and I miss him. I think of his big feet and those big boots. But I look at the purple shirt and I smile.

I’ll pass this shirt along to my son, Jake, who was only four when his grandpa died. He’s going to be a large man like my dad and the only one who the shirt will fit.

—A s to ld to Em i ly S p i vac k

Rosanne Cash is a singer-songwriter and author.

Rosanne Cash

27

I live in the New Jersey suburbs where the morning weather often bears little or no relation to what the weather might be like in the afternoon in New York, where I work. Many days I have miscalculated my clothing needs for the day—in part because I work in Midtown in a forest of tall buildings and if there is a chill in the air, it is multiplied by the wind that becomes amplified and focused by the canyon of structures around me.

I generally deal with the dissonance by refus-ing to go outside or by grabbing a fake cashmere scarf for five bucks off the street vendor tables in Times Square. I generally think there is an direct relationship between what you pay for an item and how long you hang on to it, so those scarves tend to come and go.

But even if they last, I am a spiller, so they become a sort of napkin-cravat after a while and my wife quietly retires them without telling me. (Though I do have a watch I bought on Canal Street almost a decade ago for five bucks and it is still with me. I wear it every day and replace the battery every few years for more than the cost of the watch. But that’s a different story.)

But on a very hot day last summer, I had the opposite problem. I left for work dressed for a rare television shoot, which means that I had put on a sport coat and dress shirt with a tie on top, and wore the usual black jeans and sneakers on bottom. After work, I was meeting a pal at the Frying Pan, which is a bar on a no-longer-sea-worthy boat off of a pier in Chelsea.

The bar is aptly named. On a sunny day, the light and heat reflecting off the water mean that the people on the boat are slowly sautéed. Yes, a sunset on the Hudson is an amazing thing, so spectacu-lar that even my home state of New Jersey looks majestic, but it can get very hot out there. It’s also worth mentioning that Manhattan itself throws off a fair amount of heat because of the so-called “heat island” effect.

It was still very hot when I left my office in Midtown at the end of the day and even though I left behind my sport coat, the sun immediately absorbed into the dark dress shirt I was wearing, so I walked down the street to the tourists’ shops of Times Square for any old t-shirt that I could wear. Even at six bucks a pop, they were hideous, all of them swaddled in the announcement that the wearer was in fact, or had once been, on a particular island off the coast of America called New York.

I was just about to give up. My fading hipster cred—already suffering many hellacious blows because of advancing age—would not allow me to wear a shirt suggesting that “I (heart) New York.” You can’t wear a shirt like that ironically unless, say, you hate New York, which I do not. I still have an immigrant’s ardor for the place, having come here a decade ago for a job. Before my family came, I lived in Tribeca for a few months. My second day in New York, I rode my bike into a fence at Broadway and Canal because I was looking up at a pair of tall buildings downtown. Those building are now gone, but the wonder, the sense of awe at traveling through one of human kind’s greatest creations, remains.

And then I saw one—XL, thank god—in which the classic New York script had been misprinted upside down. I knew what to do. I turned to the guy running the shop and said, “This one is a misprint. I’ll give you three bucks.” He said nothing, but nodded. I paid in two crumpled bills and quarters, ducked behind a rack and put it on. As soon as I stepped out on the street, people stared. I got on the C train to 23rd and a kid next to me stared at the logo over my burgeoning middle-aged midsection, and said, “I like your shirt.”

“Thanks, man. Three bucks.”Whenever I wear the shirt in New York,

waitresses, bartenders, cab drivers, they all say nice things about the shirt and ignore the fact that the rack it’s hanging on could use some work. When

David Carr

28 29

I travel, which is fairly often, and wear the shirt, which is less often, nobody ever says anything. I like that about my shirt: It is something that is intui-tively understood in the City, as we insufferable locals call it, and is baffling to others, akin to many other aspects of living or working in New York.

I daydreamed for a while about getting some pals of my wife in the clothing business to crank a few hundred out. I even had a slogan for the back: “Turning New York upside down one shirt at a

time.” But then someone in the business explained to me that you couldn’t trademark the idea of turn-ing lettering someone else created upside down. So I just wear mine instead.

It won’t last. It’s white for one thing, and a series of small food and beverage disasters have already begun to dapple its surface. One day, it will accumu-late enough stains and history so that it will mysteri-ously disappear from my drawer. I will miss it.

David Carr is an author and works for the New York Times as media columnist and culture reporter.

Ariel Schrag: My friends and I used to walk up and down Telegraph Avenue buying t-shirts, weed patches, and herbal cigarettes. I wanted to be this tough skater so all my clothes were really big and baggy; giant shredded jeans with fishnets underneath, Airwalks, and suspenders. I loved the suspender look but when you have breasts, where do your suspenders go? Girls can’t really wear suspenders if they have anything above a negative A-cup, otherwise the suspenders are always askew or around one breast or pushing to both sides or in the middle or awkwardly rubbing against your nip-ples. My baggy look only lasted a little while. Then I went straight into the No Doubt Gwen Stefani look and I would wear these wife beaters, wing tips, and brown slacks.

This Puma t-shirt came from the store Wasteland. I bought it during my skater-goth phase before I switched to the No Doubt ska look. I really loved it, but after a couple of months of wear, it just felt like it was too big. I sold it back to Wasteland, probably to buy some No Doubt stuff, a five-pack of wife beaters, or hair bleach. Funds were limited so this shirt had to go, but it was one of those shirts I always remembered missing after I had given it away.

Matt Wolf: Ariel was way cooler than I was in high school. She was a notable gay teenager in Berkeley and a few years older than me. I knew of her through her comic character. I was an overachieving gay activist who self-identified as a gay separatist in school because I didn’t have any friends.

I got involved with this gay activist organization in San Francisco and would use it as an excuse to take the CalTrain into the city every week from San Jose. I’d go to an hour and a half meeting and then walk around the city with a fictional purpose because I wanted to be cosmopolitan. I would take the bus to Haight Street and go to the thrift stores. As I was defining my edge, as one might say, I would

wear baggy jeans with No Fear or Gumby t-shirts and dog tags. It was around that time that I realized it was cooler to wear old stuff, even if it didn’t really fit, and that’s when I started shopping at thrift stores in San Francisco.

AS: Late one perfect summer night about six months ago, I walked into the Graham Avenue Deli in Williamsburg, and Matt was in the bodega. He and I had become friends over the years and we lived in the same neighborhood. That night, I immediately recognized that he was wearing my Puma shirt.

MW: Ariel was like, “Hey Matt! Wait a minute. What are you wearing?” I was stoned at the deli, looking for sugar-free chocolate, so my response time was slow.

AS: And I felt stoned because he was wearing my shirt. It had been out of my life for a decade or two, but I knew it instantly. I told him, “I used to have a shirt just like that when I was in high school, but I got rid of it. I gave it away to Wasteland.” He told me he’d bought it in high school at Wasteland.

I’m neurotic and don’t like the feel of tags on my skin so I cut them out of my shirts. It’s very likely I cut the tag off this t-shirt, which is why there’s a hole in the neck. And the side of the shirt is shredded because all my shirts at the time would get caught on my studded belt and rip. There’s no question whether it had been mine or not.

MW: It is one of my only thrift store purchases that actually fit me. And one of the only pieces of cloth-ing I held onto from high school. I always feel awk-ward and uncomfortable in whatever I’m wearing. It’s normal for my clothes not to fit right, but I wear this t-shirt constantly because I love it so much. It’s soft, perfectly threadbare, but not see-through, and I think I look good in it.

Matt Wolf and Ariel Schrag

31

AS: And that’s what killed me—how good Matt looked in it that night at the bodega. It was every-thing I couldn’t be as this awkward teenage girl with breasts and suspenders, wearing a too-big t-shirt. And then there’s Matt, a man, and the shirt falls just right on his chest. I wanted to tell him to give

me the shirt back. Instead, I walked home from the deli and emailed him a photo of my mid-nineties, purple haired teenage self, sitting on a curb in my baggy jeans with a skateboard on my lap, staring at the camera, and wearing that t-shirt.

—A s to ld to Em i ly S p i vac k

Ariel Schrag is the author of the novel Adam, the graphic memoirs Awkward and Definition, Potential, and Likewise, and

has written on television series for HBO and Showtime. She was born in Berkeley, California, and lives in Brooklyn.

Matt Wolf is a filmmaker in New York. His film Teenage is about the birth of youth culture, and his documentary Wild

Combination is about the avant-garde cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell.

33

A few weeks shy of my twentieth birthday in 2004, I moved to New Orleans. Shortly thereafter, one of my best friends came to visit. We played tourist and partied on and off Bourbon Street. In a run-down gift shop we stumbled into, we discovered a back room full of cheap blouses and hippie skirts. I bought this batik tie-dye wrap skirt for ten dollars.

The first time I wore the skirt was a few weeks later. I was in New York for the Republican National Convention protests, documenting a march I had helped organize. In my downtime I was exploring the city, and at dusk wound up walking alone through Central Park. There I encountered a group of pagans at the edge of the park. They were holding hands and dancing in a circle. A man on the end of the spiral locked eyes with me, extended his arm my way, and said, “Join us.” For some reason, I did. And we twirled about in the park, stopping eventually to light candles and pray for peace.

A couple years later, I was living in Asheville, North Carolina, spending my time waiting tables at a Cajun pub downtown while trying to decide if I wanted to go back to college or do something else with my life. One night I was in front of the restaurant on a smoke break, wearing my batik skirt. As I was putting out my cigarette to go back inside,

coincidentally, my best guy friend from high school walked out of the bar next door. He dropped his beer and picked me up, twirling me around a few times before placing my feet back on the sidewalk. It was a slow night, so I stayed outside chatting for a while. He told me he was in town for final training before redeploying to Iraq for his second tour. I got the address of the hotel where he was staying and promised to meet him at the bar there a few hours later. We stayed up late drinking Long Island Iced Teas. He got sloshy and dropped a lit cigarette in my lap, leaving a small burn stain on the skirt. Two days later he was shipped out.

After Asheville, I moved to Seattle to finish college. On a warm spring day I pulled my skirt out of the closet and wore it around town. A stranger at the coffee shop came up to me and asked me out. This happened frequently when I wore this skirt; men were strangely attracted to what was slowly becoming a cheap, stained rag. It was ripped from biking in it, stained in spots, and it carried a couple burn holes that were quite noticeable. I thanked him for his attention and politely declined. That night, still in my favorite skirt, I checked my email and found out that my friend had died in Iraq.

Kelly Jones

Kelly Jones is a New Orleans–based writer who makes a living as a writing tutor,

bartender, and web content ghostwriter.

35

This t-shirt is from the first soccer tournament I played in, the Redwood Classic in Petaluma, California. It was 1979 and I was ten years old. Driving to the tournament felt like we were going somewhere really special, like we were traveling across the Earth, because we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, but really we only drove an hour and fifteen minutes from my parents’ house in San Jose to get to this weekend-long tournament.

My soccer team’s name was the Horizon and my dad was the coach. He was my coach my entire youth soccer career, from the time I was nine until I was sixteen years old. He didn’t know anything about soccer so we learned together. We went to the library, got books, watched videos, and had season tickets to the Earthquakes.

It was an interesting time for soccer. It was seen as a foreign sport, so there was a lot of international influence. At the same time, soccer had just started to get a foothold in what was called the North American Soccer League. This was the era when Pelé played for the New York Cosmos.

It was the perfect storm; I started playing a game that had just begun an American league with these international stars that had played in the World Cups and European Cups. I got hooked. And luckily for me, I grew up in California in a neighborhood where people were cool about trying everything. It was a very encouraging and familial

environment; in addition to my dad acting as my coach, my mom was the quintessential soccer mom, yelling through the megaphone from the sidelines (she was also a bit of a pack rack and saved this t-shirt for me). My teammates were all my neigh-bors, and they felt like my sisters. It was a special time. I’ve been around the world and played in really big games, but that was one of my favorite moments playing soccer.

One of the reasons that the Redwood Classic was so memorable was that the tournament was also hosting a juggling contest. I had soccer practice twice a week and I was with the ball a little bit every day until my mom would call me in for dinner. But I was also really excited about juggling. I would prac-tice in my free time: in my house, in my backyard, at school. It was the first time I saw myself as a young girl trying to get better at something because I really wanted to do well in the juggling contest.

We probably came in second or third or fourth in the soccer tournament. I actually don’t remem-ber. I do remember that in between games, the juggling contest took place. Somewhere there’s a photograph where I’m wearing the tournament t-shirt and holding two ribbons. One was for soccer and the other one was for juggling. I came in seventh place.

—A s to ld to Em i ly S p i vac k

Brandi Chastain

Brandi Chastain is a professional soccer player who has won two Women’s World Cup

championships, two Olympic gold medals, and an Olympic silver medal.

37

Shortly after I arrived in India, I made my way to the Maha Kumbh Mela, a Hindu gathering that happens once every 144 years, when the planets align in such a way that they point to an intersec-tion of the Ganges, the Yamuna, and Saraswati rivers, in Allahabad. According to Hindu tradition, it’s believed that if you bathe in the rivers’ intersec-tion at sunrise on that specific day, then you receive amrita—the nectar of immortality—and you’re freed from the cycle of life and death.

I was living with the Rainbow Gathering while I was at the Kumbh Mela. I had these wicked long dreadlocks and a hammock that I had made out of a piece of cloth and string. I ate free meals that the Hare Krishnas gave out. I had a crush on this girl who sang Hindu chants on the other side of the bonfire every night. Everyone was stroking each other with love and spiritual guidance, and it was just fucking beautiful.

I met this American journalist, Rob, and I found out that we were going on the same two-week silent meditation retreat. I’d admired his shirt, which he had custom made at a local tailor; I just thought it was dope. We hung out all afternoon and we bathed together at the intersection of the rivers at sundown. Afterward, he gave me his shirt. I’d been shirtless at the Maha Kumbh Mela, but after that, I wore it every day.

The meditation retreat at the Thai temple in Bodh Gaya was otherworldly, in-sync-with-the-cosmos type shit. It was like being thrust into the professional level of a certain culture that I knew very little about, having skipped the minor leagues to get there. The lesson that came out of the retreat was rooted in Vipassana, the breath, and the ability to breathe through any experience; that becomes your shield.

After the retreat, I split off from Rob and made friends with an English-speaking rickshaw driver. I hung out with him for a couple days in Jaipur, and we established a rapport.

I had traveler’s checks and needed to exchange money. I knew I’d get a better rate on the black market so I asked the rickshaw driver if he knew anyone. He took me to a little jewelry shop on a cobblestone street. The guys were friendly and they gave me a good rate. They asked if I’d like to go out with them that evening. I didn’t want to say no to an adventure. They told me I needed to clean myself up because they were taking me to a fancy place. They bought me a pair of shiny silver suit pants, shoes, and a belt. I wore the shirt that Rob had given me, tucked into the suit pants. I pulled back my dreadlocks.

That night was straight gangster cliché. We went to a nondescript building, through a cellar door, down stairs, and through a bustling, smoky kitchen. At the end of the kitchen, a door led to a strip club with really nasty looking strippers. Guys were making it rain rupees. We got hammered and afterward my rickshaw driver took me back to my hotel. It was super fun, so I hung out with them again the next night.

On the second night they said, “The reason we’ve been courting you is because we have a prop-osition.” They went on to explain that, in India, you’re only allowed to export a certain amount of jewelry each year to the U.S. without having to pay a tariff, but that on a U.S. passport, you could bring up to an additional $20,000 worth of purchased goods into the U.S. They asked if I would take jew-elry back to the U.S., or mail it to myself and drop it off at a jeweler in New York City. I’d get $20,000 and they’d sell the jewelry for $90,000. I told them I wasn’t interested a number of times and they urged me to call former backpackers who’d done it, a Brit and an American, who were very convincing. Eventually, I decided it was a no-risk situation, and while I wasn’t in a materialistic state of mind at that point, I thought I’d buy my mom the hot tub she’d always wanted.

Since I didn’t want to carry the jewels on my

Jeff Zimbalist

38 39

That information was enough for me to get a pro bono attorney. My attorney put together a brief and sent it to the bank. The bank pushed back a couple of times with settlement offers but we didn’t take any of them. The statute of limitations has now expired for the case and although I have no idea what to do with them, I still have the jewels.

I had a tremendously romantic affair with India

before it broke my heart, but I’ve chosen to love it again. In fact, I’ve been back a few times. I have always sought the spirit I had during that trip; that’s part of the reason why I’ve held onto this shirt. Because I’d like to think I can still summon the total carpe diem, reckless abandon, bulletproof sense of invincibility that I once had wearing that shirt.

—A s to ld to Em i ly S p i vac k

person, I put them in a package, and they took me to a post office where I mailed them to my mom’s house in Massachusetts. As soon as I did that, things changed. I got picked up by two massive angry looking dudes who didn’t speak English, in a car I’d never seen before. And they had my bag in the car! Since the rickshaw driver knew where I was staying, he had taken my bag from the hotel and signed me out. The two guys in the car said that their boss didn’t trust me and that I needed to fly with them to Bombay to convince their boss that everything was okay. I told them I didn’t want to go, of course. Tensions were rising, and I was in a tough situation because they could have been armed. I reminded myself that I had this tool, the breath, Vipassana, an idealistic philosophy that I could breathe through it.

We took a private plane to Bombay and were picked up by a driver. I rode in a car with three guys who spoke no English for an hour and a half through the Bombay night. They took me to the penthouse of a crappy hotel where I wound up bunking with two of the guys, who stayed in the room with me at all times. I wasn’t allowed to leave except to go to the hotel restaurant where a few times a day the boss would show up and tell me I needed to put a $20,000 deposit on my credit card before they could let me go. He said his guys had been too trusting and had sent the jewels too soon. He wasn’t sure if I would rob them or actually take the jewels to New York.

I realized the irony of the situation. It was 180 degrees from staring across the bonfire at the dread-lock girl at the Rainbow Gathering on top of the hill, under the trees and stars, singing Hindu chants at Kumbh Mela.

On the third morning, I snuck out of the hotel while the guys were still sleeping. I found a call center and called my credit card company. I spoke to two representatives who assured me that the credit card company would cover me on misrepre-sentation of merchandise because they personally approve each of their vendors across the world. I got

off the phone thinking, “Fuck it. If the credit card company is willing to take the risk, I need to get the hell out of here.”

Since I didn’t have my own credit card at the time, they ran my mom’s credit card. She’d given it to me for emergencies only and I figured I’d been kidnapped for three days, and even I, who has a higher tolerance for risk, felt that this was an emergency. I signed over the maximum on the card, $16,100.

And in no time, I was on a plane heading back to the States with all my stuff, still wearing the same shirt Rob had given me at the Kumbh Mela. They even paid for my ticket out of Bombay. I was sitting on the flight thinking that everything might be okay—they had just dropped a thousand dollars to fly me home, bought me clothes, put me up in a hotel, and they were all smiles and hugs, reassuring me.

I got home and the jewels arrived on schedule. I immediately got them appraised. They were worth $2,500, not $20,000. And then my mom’s credit card was charged $16,100. When I called the credit card company, they said to look at the fine print. They would only cover misrepresentation within a one hundred mile radius of one’s billing address, never mind another hemisphere.

At that point, I had to admit to my mom that I’d been scammed. All my pride of being able to survive anywhere, the years traveling in Latin America and all the spiritual highs of my semi-enlightened self in India came crashing down into a harsh reality.

I cut my dreadlocks off, bought a suit from Goodwill, and went to the local law library in the basement of a church in Northampton, Massachusetts. I asked them to take me to the consumer protection section and I spent two weeks asking questions of paralegals, lawyers, and law librarians. One day when I came into the library, one of the law librarians was holding up a manila folder of printouts like it was the fucking Pelican Brief. She told me she’d found a relevant case that had been settled out of court.

Jeff Zimbalist is a filmmaker whose films include Favela Rising, The Two Escobars, Youngstown Boys,

Bollywood: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, and Pelé—Birth of the Legend.

41

In the 1970s my grandfather, Murray Meisner, was called him “the man who dressed New York.” Through the seventies and part of the eighties, his eponymous women’s wear company was known for its practical dresses. They were sold at J.C. Penny’s and Sears, to secretaries and other workingwomen. One denim dress he designed became so popular that he had to move all the company’s manufactur-ing to China to keep up with the demand—that was a really big deal back then.

My dad would take me to visit my grandfather at his office in the garment district. My grandfather was always so proud of his grandchildren, and he’d parade me around the office to meet his employees, which, when I was young, felt like so many people. During one visit in the early eighties, when I was four or five years old, I told my grandfather that I wanted to be Minnie Mouse for Halloween. Since they had sewers on-site, they made me a costume on the spot, a red and white apron with ruffles that Minnie Mouse would wear. I loved it.

One day, sometime in 2003, I was bored at work and I googled my grandfather. I found a few of his

dresses for sale on eBay, Etsy, and an online vintage boutique. I started buying the ones I could imagine wearing. That began my Murray Meisner dress collection.

I have six now. When I told my grandfather I was collecting his dresses, he thought it was hysterical. “You’re doing what? Your grandmother would have a heart attack if she knew,” he told me. My grandmother had been one of those New York women who lived on the Upper East Side and didn’t work. She’d never consider wearing one of her husband’s dresses. She wore almost exclusively Chanel. And every Saturday she’d walk up and down Fifth Avenue window-shopping. I guess you could say she was sort of snobby, but there was more to her than that.

In 2004 I started my own company, which required a more professional look. I had to go from dressing like a kid to dressing like an adult. And so strangely, I found myself—as thousands of women had decades before me—slipping into Murray Meisner originals to head to the office.

—A s to ld to Em i ly S p i vac k

Jill Meisner

Jill Meisner is the director of public relations for Refinery 29.

43

In 2011 I was invited to the White House to read poetry for President Obama’s “Celebration of American Poetry.” During the day I did a poetry workshop with Michelle Obama for seventy high school students in the State Dining Room, and in the evening I did a formal reading in the East Room, where I read traffic reports to the President of the United States. Of course, the biggest ques-tion was what I would wear.

My suit was designed by the avant-garde designer Thom Browne, under his Brooks Brothers’ owned Black Fleece label. He pretty much does what I was doing by reading traffic reports at the White House: taking the traditional patterns that Brooks Brothers is known for—in this case paisley—and pushing them way too far. (Coincidentally, Obama was also wearing a Brooks Brothers suit when he met me, but of a very different sort.) During the day session with the First Lady, I wore a Thom Browne pastel suit, which references the insane pastels of the preppy Newport set. For this suit, Brown created a pastiche or patch-work of traditional preppy colors and literally made a remix of them.

It was clear that Brooks Brothers needed to revitalize their brand, shake up the staid traditions, hence they called in Browne to bring them into the twenty-first century and to add a big dose of impu-rity. Clearly that meant not ditching their classic line, but spinning off another line based on what they had become famous for.

I figured that the Obamas—preps to the

core—would in some way recognize the paisley and the pastels, but be befuddled by the size of the paisley or the way that the pastels were unconven-tionally stitched together. And that, in fact, was the case. Upon meeting the President, the first thing he said to me was, “That’s a great suit! You know? I’d wear a suit like that. But my staff would never let me.” To which I replied, “Mr. President, this is one instance where it’s better being an artist than being the President of the United States: artists can wear anything they want.” And then he glanced down at my saddle shoes and exclaimed, “You’re wearing golf shoes!” Which in part was true, that being the genius of Thom Browne, to take something familiar and recontextualize it to the point of it being “wrong,” which is exactly what I aimed to do with my performance: to straddle tradition and radical-ity, being both and, at the same time, being neither; to embrace contradiction, keep people guessing.

That evening Jon Stewart took the piss out of me on The Daily Show: “American poets, young and old, spoke out at the White House tonight about a variety of subjects from support for public libraries to memories of a favorite teacher to how hard it is to find a nice blazer on short notice. Uh...it’s tonight? Does that wallpaper come off ?”

A year and a half later, Thom Browne exploded across the world when it was revealed that he designed Michelle Obama’s 2013 Inauguration dress. I like to think that I played some small part in that decision.

Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith is a poet, founding editor of UbuWeb, and the first Poet Laureate

at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

45

LCD Soundsystem never had a uniform or a cool look on stage. We all looked like substitute teachers: jeans, sweaters, t-shirts, sneakers.

When we started out, we had a half hour’s worth of music to play live. Then the shows gradually got longer and more intense, and turned into these epic sets. I sweat a lot in general, but during those shows, I would sweat so profusely that my jeans would be drenched and I’d be soaked to the bone.

After a show, I’d hang my jeans up to dry in the tour bus, but people would get upset because it smelled really bad, like rotten cotton. I tried drying them in the cargo area of the bus but mold colonies grew on them. This was when we had relatively few creature comforts, and we didn’t get to do laundry that much.

I needed a solution—something that would dry quickly and not rot—so I went to American Apparel and bought a pair of flesh-colored nylon short shorts. I thought I’d wear them as a joke—you know, to wind people up. But it also totally improved the bus/clothing situation. Because they were made of nylon, I could wash them with hand soap, ring them out, hang them up on the bus to dry, and the next day they would be fine. And if I draped them over the door of the bathroom backstage and we rolled out without them, I could always replace them with another pair because there’s an American Apparel in every major city in the world.

The shorts had the added bonus of coming in

almost my exact flesh color so if we were playing a massive festival where people were a hundred yards back, it looked like I came on stage with no clothes on. Fans came to expect them. When I walked out on stage in my tiny shorts, I got a little cheer. I’m shy but I have quite an exhibitionist streak, and I like to do things for a laugh.

I have always had terrible stage fright. Once I play the first note of the first song, I’m fine, but before that, I can get paralytically afraid. The only way I could overcome the fear was to make sure that everything was the same every night. I’m not a baseball fan, but the other day I was at a Red Sox game and one of the batters had this elaborate juju that he did with his batting helmet and gloves. He had to have everything just right so he could hit the ball. Each time before we played, I had to make sure my sneakers were tied just right, that the seat was just so, that my drums went exactly where they’d been marked on the rug. And although my shorts were very much the opposite of armor, they also became part of the ritual. I might have been tired or my hands might have hurt or I might have been hungover, but at least my clothing and physical proximity to the drums was always the same. Knowing that I was going to be comfortable to play for two to three hours was hugely important. Then I could launch right into it.

—A s to ld to Em i ly S p i vac k

Pat Mahoney

Pat Mahoney was a founding member and drummer for LCD Soundsystem and is lead vocalist for Museum of Love.

47

I have a small collection of men’s garments that I’ve acquired from one-night stands. I’ve never taken something that wasn’t given to me. Yet, whether I'm handed an extra t-shirt to sleep in or a scarf to wear home, I’ve managed to accumulate dating memora-bilia and I don’t know what to do with them.

I’m not a hoarder. I clean out my wardrobe diligently every six months. Yet I keep the remains of these escapades neatly tucked away in the back of my closet, empty shells of late nights and question-able decisions that evolved into nothing at all.

The first piece of clothing I ever kept was that of a young man named Roger who I met at a sports bar on Third Avenue. I left his apartment early on the morning that followed our long night—a pitiful but endearing pickup line, endless cheap drinks, a late night invitation, and an even later night acceptance. After I finished getting dressed, Roger gave me an extra-large, royal blue sweatshirt that was soft from frequent washing and had sleeves that were so long that only the tips of my fingers peeked out from the cuffs. He deposited the sweatshirt into my arms and kindly told me I would need it. It was April and still fairly chilly in the morning. Roger asked me to give it back to him the next time I saw him. He walked me to the front door and as he kissed me goodbye, I was acutely aware that I did not have his phone number nor did he have mine.

I remember it was Palm Sunday. As I headed to the train, dozens of people were walking to church in pastel-colored clothes, carrying dead palm leaves that swept the sidewalk. I was far out in Brooklyn, and my very presence, that of a tall, blonde twen-ty-something, was so out of place that two different people stopped me to ask if I was lost. I consulted Google Maps as I walked to an unknown train stop. I kept my head down with my hair piled into a bun and my body wrapped in a stranger’s sweatshirt that I would never wear again.

Maybe it wasn’t even his sweatshirt. It could have been a roommate’s or the remnants of some party. Maybe Roger thought the sweatshirt would pacify any requests for phone numbers or doubts regarding his follow up. Perhaps he felt guilty that I would be cold, that I had traveled all the way into the depths of Brooklyn only to make my way home alone, stopping at a bodega along the way for Vitamin Water with last night’s makeup still visible around my eyes. There is a small chance that he had some strange belief in serendipity or that he simply forgot to get my number, but I doubt either of those are the case. After a long train ride in fluorescent lighting, I arrived home and peeled off the sweat-shirt before I took a hot shower. And instead of throwing it away or putting it in my donation pile, I folded it neatly, the way previous retail experience had taught me. And I placed it in the back of my closet, next to old scrapbooks my aunt had made me when I graduated from college.

These garments that I’ve collected—mind you, there are only a few—are not special. In fact, few of them are even aesthetically interesting. Yet, they possess a rare quality that borders on metaphys-ical, housing connections to people and actions that have no other proof of existence. When I get home from late night ventures, I want to get rid of the clothes. I want to throw them into the cloth-ing abyss and have my wardrobe show no proof of actions that might be deemed questionable by onlookers or my retrospective self. This cultural ritual of hooking-up is often quickly followed by a feigned physical and emotional amnesia. And it makes me wonder why do we, why do I, do some-thing that I’m so anxious to forget? I don’t want the clothes but I don’t want to not want the clothes. To throw them away, to donate them would be to leave these blurry nights unexamined. So I keep the sweatshirts and t-shirts and face my growing pile.

Laura Jane Kenny

Laura Jane Kenny is a fashion writer living in New York.

49

My brother bought this t-shirt at the Saratoga Race Track in 1989. Easy Goer was a three-year-old that year, and he was our favorite horse. We used to go to the Saratoga track every summer with our parents—it was a two-hour drive from the cottage we stayed in. I wanted this shirt too, but they didn’t have my size.

My brother and I were childhood horse-racing junkies. We never went to Disneyland or Great Adventure, but we did go to Aqueduct, Belmont, Saratoga, and Monmouth. Our parents loved racing and they trained us young. My father liked to say I could decode the Racing Form before I learned to read, and that is almost the truth.

In fourth and fifth grade, I could recite, in order, the names of the top-ten-earning thoroughbred sires—the stallions whose offspring won the most races and made the most money. I knew how to look for a cleanly proportioned horse in the paddock. I ate raisin bran in the morning because racehorses ate bran mash. I wanted to be a trainer someday. In the meantime, I kept Racing Form–worthy statistics about my imaginary stable’s wins.

In 1989 Easy Goer ran the fastest mile that any three-year-old had ever run—quicker even than Secretariat. He was a big handsome chestnut with a bright star on his head. But his story is slightly melancholy.

As a two-year-old, Easy Goer was named cham-pion and became an early favorite for the Kentucky Derby. Horses race when they are two years old but they often don’t come into their own until they are three or four. The Triple Crown, which takes places early in their third year, is a test of stamina and talent.

Leading up to the Derby, Easy Goer looked unbeatable. We thought he would win the Triple Crown, which hadn’t been done since 1978. But it rained on Derby day, and Easy Goer’s rival, a horse named Sunday Silence, won. Easy Goer didn’t like the mud; he came in second, finishing “on class and talent,” his jockey said. Then Sunday Silence also beat Easy Goer in the Preakness—by a nose in a photo finish. (Some people think Easy Goer got a bad ride by his jockey.)

At last, in the Belmont Stakes, the third race of the Triple Crown, Easy Goer won by eight lengths. He blew Sunday Silence away. While it would have been thrilling to watch Sunday Silence sweep the Triple Crown, I was excited that Easy Goer came back to beat him in the Belmont, often consid-ered the hardest race in the series because it is the longest.

So when we saw this Easy Goer shirt we wanted it because the red horse was a champion, despite his luck. A week after our trip to Saratoga, Easy Goer beat Sunday Silence at the Travers Stakes, the meet’s famous race.

When Easy Goer was eight—still young for a horse—he died of a heart attack. One day, he came running over to his groom in the paddock; moments later he went down on his knees, as the Los Angeles Times reported it, and died.

Years after, when I was twenty-one in 1998, I took this shirt from my brother because I hadn’t grown much since 1989, and he had. I used to wear it when I went running. It was soft and a little ragged from years of use, and with it on I always felt faster than I really was.

Meghan O’Rourke

Meghan O’Rourke is a former literary editor at Slate, and the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye

and the poetry collections Halflife and Once.